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Chrystia Freeland | Analysis & Opinion | Reuters.com
You might call it the cognitive divide — the split between an evidence-based worldview and one that is rooted in faith or ideology — and it is one of the most important fault lines in the United States today.
President Barack Obama called attention to the cognitive divide, and reminded us which side he comes down on, at the beginning of this week, when he chose the Princeton University economist Alan Krueger to lead his Council of Economic Advisers. -
The Fatal Distraction - NYTimes.com
Friday brought two numbers that should have everyone in Washington saying, “My God, what have we done?”
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Paul Krugman
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One of these numbers was zero — the number of jobs created in August. The other was two — the interest rate on 10-year U.S. bonds, almost as low as this rate has ever gone. Taken together, these numbers almost scream that the inside-the-Beltway crowd has been worrying about the wrong things, and inflicting grievous harm as a result. -
Hackers steal SSL certificates for CIA, MI6, Mossad - Computerworld
Computerworld - The tally of digital certificates stolen from a Dutch company in July has exploded to more than 500, including ones for intelligence services like the CIA, the U.K.'s MI6 and Israel's Mossad, a Mozilla developer said Sunday.
The confirmed count of fraudulently-issued SSL (secure socket layer) certificates now stands at 531, said Gervase Markham, a Mozilla developer who is part of the team that has been working to modify Firefox to blocks all sites signed with the purloined certificates. -
Programming Isn't Fun Any More
A colleague of mine from the Britton Lee days (worth a post of its own) recently sent out a message that hit home. Repeated with permission:
From: Jim Bradford <(deleted)@(deleted).com>
Subject: programming isn't fun anymore
Date: August 23, 2011 4:19:31 PM -0600
I used to enjoy writing programs. I could write lines of code, compile them, link them and run them and they would do things. Useful things. They would solve problems. Or they could take input and produce output. Now all that is ancient history.
I don't write code. I learn tools. Or try to learn tools. Problem is, there are more tools than anyone can keep track of. Some people know some tools and so they can get work done. These people are called "architects" and they expect everyone will know the same tools they know. Or everyone should. If they don't, those people are stupid and should be shunned and ignored. We programmers know a few tools but not the ones the architect knows. That's ok - we've learned lots of tools over the years so we keep quiet and think to ourselves "I don't know what this guy is talking about but I can learn these tools". So when the architect says "exclude slf4j from the library's build sequence or modify the pom file dependency list" we don't say "what the hell are you talking about". We don't say anything. We go to google and spend the next two weeks learning slf4j and Ivy and Maven, and RESTful WebServices and Grails, and the proper syntax for the BuildConfig file. Then we reboot the computer three or four times for good measure; download security patches for the IDE; get the latest version of the JDK; clone a few repositories from GitHub; study the Artifactory website; look for new docs on the wiki; and hope to god someone has figured out why the WAR file doesn't deploy to the 3.2 version of the app server. In all this time no code has been written. No problems have been solved. No user interfaces have been created. But everyone has been terribly busy. And the architect has been studying newer, better versions of the three or four tools we have now almost learned, but which have become obsolete. Eventually, the project is cancelled. Management decides to continue using the prototype version written in Objective-C, even tho the source code has been lost and it doesn't use any of the company-standard tools, because it does 80% of what the one customer wants, and no one else really needs the application anymore.
That's the story of my professional career. Trying to learn things fast enough to create programs to solve problems that go away by themselves or weren't worth spending time on in the first place. Sisyphus had more job satisfaction. -
Become a Good Programmer in Six Really Hard Steps - GameDev.net
One of the more popular topics here on the GDNet forums goes something like this:
"Hi, I just [bought a computer | wrote a simple game | discovered a game engine] and I want to know where to go from here. I'd like to [accomplish some particular goal] eventually. What do I need to learn to get there?"
First of all, understand that Peter Norvig nailed this on the head a long time ago: it takes ten years to learn to be a programmer. There's a glut of "learn X in some small number of days" type books out there; there are hordes of blog posts about "how to improve your programming-fu in a few easy ways"; and in general a lot of people come around looking for advice on how to become a whiz with minimal effort.
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
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